I miss the US more and more, and have recently been trying to perfect Southern Biscuits using British ingredients. It took me eight or nine tries before I was consistently getting good results. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients

• 190g plain flour
• 60g strong white bread flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp cream of tartar (optional)
• 1 tsp salt
• 100g unsalted butter
• 180ml buttermilk, chilled
  • If your buttermilk is thicker than the consistency of ordinary milk, you’ll need around 200ml.
• extra buttermilk for brushing

Method

1. Slice and then chill the butter in the freezer for at least fifteen minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 220°C with the fan turned off.
3. Twice sieve together the flours, leaveners and salt. Some salt may not go through the sieve; just tip it back into the bowl.
4. Cut cold butter slices into the flour with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs: some small lumps of fat remaining is desirable. In particular, the fine crumbs you are looking for when making British scones are not wanted here. Rubbing in with fingertips just won’t do; biscuits demand keeping things cold even more than shortcrust pastry does.
5. Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk, and stir with a metal spoon until the dough comes together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Avoid overmixing, but I’ve found that so long as the ingredients are cold, you don’t have to be too gentle at this stage and can make sure all the crumbs are mixed in.
6. Flour your hands, turn dough onto a floured work surface, and pat together into a rectangle. Some suggest dusting the top of the dough with flour, too, here.
7. Fold the dough in half, then gather any crumbs and pat it back into the same shape. Turn ninety degrees and do the same again, until you have completed a total of eight folds, two in each cardinal direction. The dough should now be a little springy.
8. Roll to about ½ inch thick.
9. Cut out biscuits. If using a round cutter, do not twist it, as that seals the edges of the biscuits and so spoils the layering.
10. Transfer to a baking sheet, placed close together (helps them rise). Press an indent into the top of each biscuit with your thumb (helps them rise straight), brush with buttermilk.
11. Bake until flaky and golden brown: about fifteen minutes.

Gravy

It turns out that the “pepper gravy” that one commonly has with biscuits is just a white/béchamel sauce made with lots of black pepper. I haven’t got a recipe I really like for this yet. Better is a “sausage gravy”; again this has a white sauce as its base, I believe. I have a vegetarian recipe for this to try at some point.

Variations

• These biscuits do come out fluffy but not so flaky. For that you can try using lard instead of butter, if you’re not vegetarian (vegetable shortening is hard to find here).
• If you don’t have a pastry blender and don’t want to buy one you can try not slicing the butter and instead coarsely grating it into the flour out of the freezer.
• An alternative to folding is cutting and piling the layers.
• You can try rolling out to 1–1½ inches thick.
• Instead of cutting out biscuits you can just slice the whole piece of dough into equal pieces. An advantage of this is that you don’t have to re-roll, which latter also spoils the layering.
• Instead of brushing with buttermilk, you can take them out after they’ve started to rise but before they’ve browned, brush them with melted butter and put them back in.

Notes

• I’ve had more success with Dale Farm’s buttermilk than Sainsbury’s own. The former is much runnier.
• Southern culture calls for biscuits to be made the size of cat’s heads.
• Bleached flour is apparently usual in the South, but is illegal(!) here. This shouldn’t affect texture or taste but may make them look different.
• American all-purpose flour has more gluten than our plain flour, hence the mix of plain and strong white, in a ratio of 3:1.
• Baking powder in the US is usually double-acting but ours is always single-acting, so we need double quantities of that.